Bollywood & Hollywood Says STOP PIRACY

Piracy has always played a pivotal role in Bollywood as well as Hollywood industry. It causes major damage as the filmmakers expect their faithful audience to go to the theatres and watch the movie. Since, piracy is becoming a key threat, both Bollywood and Hollywood has taken up the task to fight this nuisance. Bollywood and Hollywood has made a coalition which is among the Motion Picture Association of America and seven Indian companies to tackle counterfeiting in one of the worlds’ largest film markets.

In India, Bollywood suffers mostly from camcorder piracy done in theatres. We all know this as “Theatre Print”. This term is often used in the Indian Bollywood market. Sources say camcorder piracy contributes to 90 per cent of all pirated DVDs in the Indian market.

Even the internet law is not stringent enough to tackle with piracy over the net. Internet is one place where piracy is spreading like wildfire. Downloading pirated movies, songs, clips etc is happening every second. The Indian film industry has an affluent past of copycat productions and conventionally has had less respect for the sanctity of intellectual property than Hollywood would like. In 2008, for example, Warner Bros. unsuccessfully sued to block the release of an Indian Punjabi film called Hari Puttar – A Comedy of Terrors on the grounds that the name was too close to its Harry Potter series.

The film and TV industry shaped nearly 1.8 million jobs and contributed $6.2 billion to the Indian economy in 2008. In 2008, piracy cost the Indian film industry $959 million and about 571,000 jobs. Bollywood holds a record when it comes to downloading movies. Vishal Bharadwaj’s `Kaminey’ was downloaded a record number of times (estimated at 350,000 times) in India and abroad.

Piracy, some say is an economic problem as nothing could be done to eradicate this menace. Though, in a strong way it proves to be a major blemish to the filmmakers as it jeopardizes the movie’s ability to earn profit and make more and more money. An initiative has been undertaken by the filmmakers and lot of effort has been made to stop piracy. From newspaper print ads to television commercials, the appeal is there to stop piracy. To stop piracy even the filmmakers are coming up with DVDs and VCDs and the recently evolved Blu-ray discs, so that people can buy it and watch at their own ease, anytime anywhere. Movie industries are trying their best to come out with various mediums to distribute their movies on more than just one platform. But, the plea is that the file sharers need to come up with something or someway so that people can watch them on their mobile phones too, without the conversion of files etc. Since, mobile phones are a portable medium to watch movies. People who travel more can have the luxury of watching movies and hearing songs on their mobile phones avoiding piracy.

So, a lot of things are coming up and a valiant effort has been made by the government too, but the question is, will we ever see the end of piracy?